Even in Trump’s White House, chaos has its limits

“So many people have been leaving the White House. It’s actually been really exciting and invigorating,” said Donald Trump earlier this month. “I like turnover. I like chaos. It really is good.” It is not clear whether he was joking — the remark was made during a light-hearted dinner speech — but, for Mr Trump’s sake, one hopes he meant it.

The past month has seen the resignation of his communications director Hope Hicks, the downgrading of his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s security clearance, the resignation of his senior economic adviser Gary Cohn, the sacking-by-tweet of the secretary of state Rex Tillerson, the escorting-out-of-the-building of his aide John McEntee, the firing of Andrew McCabe, deputy director of the FBI – and now HR McMaster has gone too.

Along the way Mr Trump has railed against the investigations of special counsel Robert Mueller. Chaos reigns.

It remains unclear how much method there is in all this madness, but there may be more than we think. Mr Trump does not drink, but his leadership style is reminiscent of “drunken boxing” — a style of martial arts associated with staggering around unpredictably until your opponent lets his guard down, whereupon you pop him in the mouth.

The disadvantage of chaos is that it is destabilising; the advantage is that it may destabilise your foes more than you. About four decades ago the US military strategist John Boyd (UK) (US) gave a series of influential talks about this idea. Boyd, whose admirers included senior Republican Dick Cheney and management guru Tom Peters, argued for rapid, confusing manoeuvres, improvised if need be, with the aim of disorienting the enemy. Create enough chaos and you could completely paralyse your foe. If the chaos made life uncomfortable for your own side, no matter. Synchronisation, said Boyd, was not for organisations, but for watches.

This messy, improvised approach to tactics is not entirely new. Sun Tzu, the near-mythical author of The Art of War, declared that “quickness is the essence of war”, but also advised being “without ascertainable shape”. This sounds like the incessant, incomprehensible activity of the Trump White House.

It also sounds like the campaign for the UK to leave the EU in 2016. The Brexiters seemed hamstrung by the fact that they ran two mutually suspicious campaigns — Leave.EU and Vote Leave. “It wasn’t one of my adverts,” said Nigel Farage about Vote Leave’s bus, while Boris Johnson said Mr Farage’s inflammatory poster about refugees was “not my campaign” and “not my politics”. This left the Leave campaign, as Sun Tzu advised, “without ascertainable shape”, so voters picked which ever message resonated, while the Remain campaign did not know where to look. Dominic Cummings, of Vote Leave, later said a united Leave campaign would have been easily defeated.

On the battlefield, the master of messy improvisation was the German general Erwin Rommel. He championed swift, energetic action, even if it left his own men scrambling to figure out what was happening. “I have a feeling that things are in a mess,” lamented one Berlin-based general of Rommel’s north Africa campaign in 1941. They were, but for many months the chaos took a worse toll on the British than the Germans.

The same fast-paced seizing of opportunities has worked for some businesses. In the early years of Amazon, Jeff Bezos was clear that he needed to get ahead of rivals such as Barnes & Noble and Toys R Us, even if it meant chaos within Amazon. A more methodical start-up would have been caught and crushed. “It’s a messy process,” Mr Bezos told his biographer, Brad Stone (UK) (US), but there was simply no time to be meticulous. A visitor to an Amazon warehouse in the run-up to Christmas in 1999 would have said the company was a shambles, but the chaos paid off. Amazon bled money but shipped on time, while rivals have been struggling to catch up ever since.

Of course the more ponderous forces of planning and organisation may reassert themselves in the end. Mr Trump has an uncanny ability to dominate the news cycle, change the subject whenever he wants, and turn the spotlight away from his critics and towards himself. This was a huge asset during the election campaign but is a mixed blessing in government.

Facebook’s old mantra, “move fast and break things”, suddenly looks less clever. Mark Zuckerberg must now explain exactly what he has broken.

The Brexiters are running into the limits of the improvisation, ambiguity and self-contradiction that worked so brilliantly as a campaigning strategy, and indeed as a way of managing their own divisions. On a playing field criss-crossed by technical and legal details, EU negotiator Michel Barnier’s ploddingly careful preparation now seems to be paying dividends.

Even the unpredictable Rommel was eventually defeated, by Bernard Montgomery’s cautious and meticulously planned application of force at El Alamein. Montgomery was in no hurry as he assembled everything he needed. Mr Trump may have noticed that Robert Mueller is displaying the same patience.

My book “Messy: How To Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World” is now available in paperback both in the US and the UK – or through your local bookshop.